Show Notes
Ruth 1:1-5
Pastor Christopher Chelpka
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Amen.
[00:00:01] Let's pray. As we move towards reading and preaching of God's word, we'll ask that he would be at work in our hearts, that we would hear what he has to say, that we would respond as he calls us to respond.
[00:00:16] Let's pray.
[00:00:18] Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word, the word of the Gospel, the word that Jesus comes to save sinners from their sin and that you have saved us.
[00:00:31] Lord, it is indeed very freeing to know that our sins are no longer held against us, to know that we have the righteous requirement of the law completely and perfectly filled by Jesus Christ for us, and to know that we have an inheritance that is kept in heaven for us.
[00:00:53] To know that even the struggles and the difficulties of this life are things that you are working for. Our good Lord, we are held by your marvelous fatherly hands and we ask and pray that you will never let us go.
[00:01:12] And we know you will answer that because you have promised never to let us go.
[00:01:17] Lord, we ask that you would help us to hear these things in even newer ways, deeper ways perhaps, ways that remind us of things that we have forgotten or neglected.
[00:01:30] As we come to your word in the Book of Ruth, we ask, Lord, that you would use this portion of the history of your people to build us up, to strengthen us in you in the midst of all the particular trials, our lives.
[00:01:49] Lord, we thank you for your word and we ask that you would bless it to us. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:01:58] If you would remain standing and let's turn our attention to the Book of Ruth.
[00:02:04] For a long time I've been preaching in 1st and 2nd Samuel. The book of Ruth comes just before 1 Samuel. It's small, so if you're in Judges, you just passed it.
[00:02:17] This is in the Old Testament, part of the historical books.
[00:02:22] It's fitting that Ruth comes just before the Book of First and Second Samuel, which ultimately lead us to thinking about the Davidic kingship and all that God did in raising up David, establishing a covenant with him that he fulfills in Jesus.
[00:02:42] Ruth is a fitting book to come right before that big epic because it tells us the little story that happens which eventually leads to the birth of David.
[00:02:56] We'll get to that at the very end of the book. But today we are at the beginning of the book, a hard place.
[00:03:04] The book begins with struggle, with tragedy, with many trials. Let's hear God's word. Ruth 1, verses 1 through 5.
[00:03:19] In the days when the Judges ruled, there was a famine in the land and a man of Bethlehem And Judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons.
[00:03:32] The name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife Naomi. And the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion.
[00:03:41] They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah.
[00:03:45] They went into the country of Moab and remained there. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons.
[00:03:55] These took Moabite wives.
[00:03:58] The name of the one was Orbah, and the name of the other Ruth.
[00:04:02] They lived there about 10 years.
[00:04:04] And both Malon and Kilion died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.
[00:04:13] You may be seated.
[00:04:43] We often struggle to see our lives in a way that is beyond, you know, our noses. Maybe we see our lives really from our own perspective, which, of course is natural, but that's a very limited perspective.
[00:05:00] We see only the things that are right in front of us, right around us. In fact, we often forget our own lives, our own pasts, the things that are coming for in the future. We feel everything very right here, right now.
[00:05:14] But our lives are really a part of something bigger. None of us came into existence on our own. None of us have been eternally existing, like God himself.
[00:05:27] Our stories all begin in someone else's story, our parents in particular, and other things that we could mention.
[00:05:37] David's was like this.
[00:05:39] David's story really begins in another story. All the grand narratives, the political movements, the wars, the insurrections, all these things that happened through first and Second Samuel didn't start out of nowhere, right? They started with another story, something before that. And we have that in the book of Ruth.
[00:06:01] All of the grandness, in some ways, in first and Second Samuel has this prelude in Ruth, in this very personal and intimate settings.
[00:06:15] A book with just a few people in it, a book that's focused on a family within a particular context and in some particular places, facing some very particular challenges.
[00:06:30] And Ruth's story, which this book is named after, also begins in another story, right? All of our stories begin in another story. Ultimately, all our stories begin and end with God, who through all, is through and from, and for are all things.
[00:06:50] Ruth's story begins in another story. In the first five verses of Ruth. We don't hear much about Ruth, only her name, really. It seems that the story is at first about a woman named Naomi and Naomi's life and Naomi's tragedies, Naomi's struggle, another family, another place, even another people.
[00:07:12] Naomi is a part of something Bigger herself. And one of the things that we see in the book of Ruth, or that we learn to see, is that life is not just about what we're experiencing in the moment.
[00:07:26] Life is not just about the suffering that we're enduring right now.
[00:07:31] But God is doing things that are beyond that.
[00:07:35] One of the main things that we see, particularly in these first five verses, especially as it gets filled out by the rest of the book, is that God often empties his people in order to fill them with Himself.
[00:07:49] God removes things from our lives, removes people from our lives, removes all kinds of capabilities, and puts us through struggles sometimes. But he does it for good purposes and he does it out of love.
[00:08:07] This can be hard to see, but we see it in the story of Ruth. And I want to begin today by thinking about this.
[00:08:16] How is it that we can hold fast to this truth that God empties His people in order to fill us with Himself?
[00:08:26] Well, the first thing that we can see and we ought to recognize is, is that the emptying that we experience, the loss, the trial, the grief, these things come by the Lord's hand.
[00:08:40] And that's something we're not always quick to admit. And some people push really hard against that.
[00:08:49] We might attribute our suffering to randomness, fate, merely ourselves or other people's actions.
[00:09:01] Even superstitious things are sometimes believed.
[00:09:05] All kinds of reasons can be attributed.
[00:09:08] But the Lord makes it clear here in Ruth 1, and Naomi will later say it as well, that what is going on here ultimately is in his hand.
[00:09:21] Now, that doesn't mean there aren't other things going on. And there are, of course, but this primary. The primary point that I want us to focus on this morning is, is his sovereignty in this.
[00:09:31] The first way we know that God's emptying is a prelude to his filling is because the emptying comes from Himself.
[00:09:40] The work that he does here in Naomi's life and in the lives of others is intentional. He's not falling into this. God is not doing something by accident.
[00:09:50] God is not merely responding to the famine or responding to these deaths.
[00:09:56] The Bible is clear about this in a lot of places.
[00:09:59] Consider three verses first.
[00:10:02] I'll read these quickly. So if you try to turn there, you're going to get frustrated. But maybe mark them in your notes if you want to keep track of them first. Deuteronomy 32, 39.
[00:10:13] See, now that I, even I am he, and there is no God beside me.
[00:10:19] I kill and I make alive. I wound and I heal. There is none that can deliver out of My hand.
[00:10:29] It's a strong statement.
[00:10:31] God is the beginning and end of all things.
[00:10:36] 1st Samuel 2:6.
[00:10:38] The Lord kills and brings to life. He brings down to Sheol and raises up.
[00:10:46] And then, of course, maybe the most Famous of the three, Job 1:21 Job says, the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
[00:11:00] Naomi understands this.
[00:11:04] She understands that the Lord has emptied her and the Lord has taken away these things. And indeed he has.
[00:11:13] Take a moment and put yourself in this woman's shoes. She's kind of a job, isn't she?
[00:11:20] In a way, she is an Israelite.
[00:11:24] She lives in the land of Israel, in the town of Bethlehem, which perhaps ironically means house of bread.
[00:11:34] And in the house of bread, in this bread basket, in this place where there is provision in. In the land that God has promised for his people.
[00:11:44] And they are experiencing a famine.
[00:11:49] Now, some of you have experienced hunger. We've all experienced it to some degree, right? If you've ever been hungry and missed one meal, and you go, I really, really need to eat, we say a famine is on a different level.
[00:12:07] A famine is not just wanting to eat and needing to eat, but it's not knowing that you will eat, right, because food isn't available.
[00:12:16] You might have to fight for it. You might have to stand in a long line for it. The prices might be really, really high. You're having to ration that food. You're thinking about your other family members.
[00:12:28] Where will we eat?
[00:12:30] How will we eat?
[00:12:32] My guess is that most of us have not experienced something quite that intense, although we've had little micro forms of it. But imagine being in that experience.
[00:12:42] Elimelech decides to leave, to take Naomi, to take his sons to leave to the land of Moab.
[00:12:53] Now, Moab was outside of the land of Canaan. It was one of the. It's really the.
[00:12:59] The land of the family, of the ancestors of Lot, Abraham's uncle, some kind of distant relatives. They leave out to this land and they live there for a long time, 10 years total. We read at the end there in verse four.
[00:13:20] And during this time, imagine, not only has Naomi now gone through a famine, but now she's moved to a different country, a different place, a different people, different customs, not all of which were good, not all which were conducive to worship and serving the God of Israel.
[00:13:44] If you've ever been in a new place, even a new country or a new club, a new school, and you've not felt like you belonged to, you felt disconnected, you weren't sure if you felt understood, you felt like you didn't fit in.
[00:14:01] That experience can be very isolating. It can be very hard, whether it's language barriers, culture barriers, knowing where to get things, all that kind of stuff. These were things that she experienced and had to go through.
[00:14:15] And then her husband dies and now she's there. She's a widowed woman with two sons.
[00:14:23] Her sons marry and then her sons die.
[00:14:27] She left, as she will go on to say later, she left Israel with a family. You can imagine her walking to Moab with her sons, her husband. They're going, they've got all their stuff, they move.
[00:14:45] And now she's getting ready to go back and she's like, I lost everything.
[00:14:51] I left because I had nothing. And now I'm going back with even less than I had.
[00:14:59] You can maybe imagine her revisiting the memories of walking back that path with the ones that she used to know, the ones who used to be there, the conversations they used to have, and the kind of grief that would be there in that moment.
[00:15:17] These are hard things.
[00:15:20] These are hard things. Naomi is going through tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.
[00:15:31] You can imagine these things when you imagine all of this heartache. And she doesn't seem to be particularly responsible for any of it.
[00:15:41] The scriptures do say that famine in the land was caused by the disobedience of God's people. But there's nothing to indicate here, at least, that Naomi was the particularly responsible for the famine in Israel, that other things that she did somehow deserved that hunger, deserved the death of her husband, deserved the death of her sons, and now these connections with these Moabite women.
[00:16:08] But there she is, experiencing it all, and by the hand of God. It's not random, it's not fate.
[00:16:19] What is behind the collapse of this family, these deaths?
[00:16:26] One way to answer it, in fact, one of the most important ways we can answer it is to say the Lord God, the mysterious, all powerful, ever wise God. It's his hand, as we read, that kills and takes life.
[00:16:46] But what kind of hand is that?
[00:16:50] What kind of hand, what kind of God is it that takes lives, brings about famine and storms and death and trials and tragedies?
[00:17:04] It's the God who lovingly empties his people so that he can fill them.
[00:17:12] It's hard to say this sometimes, and it's hard to believe it sometimes, because we think that when bad things happen, and if God's responsible for them, then that makes God evil, right? God is an immoral God, a bad God. If bad things are happening in my life because they're bad. And if he's the cause, then that must mean he's bad.
[00:17:34] And so sometimes, as Christians, we don't want to say that he is responsible for hard things in our lives and for suffering and trials because, well, we don't want to say bad things about God. And that's good, right? That impulse to honor him and to love him and to speak well of him, of course, is a good one.
[00:17:53] But we don't want to do that at the expense of the truth, at the expense of who he actually is and his awesomeness and his wisdom and his power.
[00:18:02] And we, of course, don't want to think of him as sinful or morally evil in some way. But why do we go there? And why doesn't that make sense?
[00:18:16] I want to think through four different reasons why we do this.
[00:18:20] And this is where we'll spend the bulk of the rest of our time.
[00:18:25] One reason we think that when suffering happens, this makes God bad in some way is because we equate wrongly all uncomfortable things with immorality.
[00:18:38] We say, if a suffering. If a suffering thing. If a bad thing is happening to me, to me, sorry. If a bad thing is happening to me. Bad in the sense of unpleasant or really, really hard suffering. Right? If a bad thing is happening, then the cause of that thing must be morally bad, right? We equate our feelings of trial with a moral equivalent. But that's not necessarily true.
[00:19:07] That's a mistake that we make in our thinking.
[00:19:10] For example, is the dentist immoral when he pulls your bad tooth?
[00:19:17] No.
[00:19:18] Is the doctor immoral when he removes the tumor out of your body?
[00:19:25] No.
[00:19:27] Is the storm, let's say, in personifying a storm for a second. Is a storm immoral when it shoots down bolts of lightning and rains?
[00:19:39] Well, no.
[00:19:40] That rain makes things grow. The lightning cleanses our forests. Good things happen.
[00:19:48] Just because something is big and there is suffering attached to it doesn't mean that the cause of it is necessarily immoral. And so we can't automatically attach immorality to God just because we're experiencing something hard. God is not sinning because I'm struggling.
[00:20:10] A second thing we think that is incorrect is that bad things happen to us and we don't deserve them, right? We think bad things. We think suffering shouldn't happen to us because I don't deserve this.
[00:20:24] I'm a good person. I've done good things. Why are these things happening to me now?
[00:20:32] As God's creation, as people made in his image, we certainly have a lot of dignity, more than we know, more than we give ourselves credit for or give God credit for.
[00:20:44] We are made in his image. We are wonderful creatures and we are loved by Him.
[00:20:50] But what do we do often with that dignity that we have? What do we do with the honor that he has given to us?
[00:20:58] We often do very terrible and horrible things to it. We hurt our neighbors. We deny the Lord. We enter into all kinds of bad behavior and thoughts. Sinful things, terrible things, embarrassing, wicked things.
[00:21:13] And not just single isolated events, but patterns in our lives, in our thoughts, in our feelings.
[00:21:20] And if you take an honest account of your life, just as if I took an honest account of my life, you would quickly discover that compared with the requirements of who God is and the kind of love that he gives us, the honor and dignity we have, and as human beings, there is so much that we don't deserve.
[00:21:43] We have sinned over and over and over against God and His law and his goodness and the call to love that if we were to really think about what we deserve in this life, the sufferings and tragedies that we experience, if we were honest, probably should be a lot worse than they are.
[00:22:04] Mistakenly, we greatly fall into error when we think, I don't deserve this.
[00:22:13] Well, you could be kind of snarky and say, yeah, you deserve this and more.
[00:22:19] You're right. But it's not because of its less, it's more. The truth is, is that God is often being, not often always being way more gracious and way more merciful to us than we give him credit for, than we even realize.
[00:22:35] Half the time we think that when we're suffering, we've hit the bottom and we're not even close.
[00:22:41] We're experiencing a loss. Let's say Naomi, for example.
[00:22:46] Let's say she experiences this loss of her husband and she says, everything's falling. She doesn't say this, but let's just pretend for a second. She says, everything's falling apart. I've experienced this famine. I'm all by myself and now I've lost my husband. Oh, no, there's more to come.
[00:23:01] And that's not to. I'm not trying to scare you and saying that, oh, whatever suffering you're experiencing now, there could be more and deeper levels to it, but there could.
[00:23:12] The point here is not to make you afraid, but to make you thankful, to help you to consider the graciousness and the mercy that God gives to you when he leaves you with friends, when he leaves you with family members, when he leaves you with all kinds of capabilities in your body, extra breaths of life.
[00:23:29] There is so much that we don't deserve that God gives to us. And so we are wrong when we say, I don't deserve this. God is treating me poorly.
[00:23:45] So the first one was we equate all uncomfortable things with immorality. Wrong.
[00:23:51] The second was we think that we don't deserve the bad things that happen to us. And the fact is we deserve a lot worse.
[00:23:59] The third thing that I'll mention, a third error in our hearts and our thinking is that we think we know how life should go, right? And so there's something unwise or unfair. Not exactly unfair, but unwise, I'll say, in how things are working.
[00:24:18] We know. We think we know how things should be.
[00:24:21] When someone should be born, when someone should die, when something should be built, when it should be torn down.
[00:24:30] Do we.
[00:24:32] Are we really in a place? Are you really prepared to stand in judgment over God and say, I think you're doing things poorly.
[00:24:41] I think your timing is bad?
[00:24:44] We think that we know when we need things in our lives and we don't.
[00:24:50] How many times have you picked or chosen a path and then found out, whoa, I wish I would have done something else? I shouldn't have bought that car. I should have bought that stock.
[00:25:00] I shouldn't have dated that person. I should have dated that person.
[00:25:05] All these decisions in our lives we barely can manage. Our own everyday decisions, our own schedule, our own checkbooks. But then when it comes to these massive matters of life and death, we think we've got it all figured out.
[00:25:19] We think that, oh, no, this person shouldn't die at this time, and this person should die at this time. And then if you scale that out to other people's and other. Other people and other lives, we end up talking about the history of the world, making decisions about the connections between events long ago and future things that we know nothing, nothing about.
[00:25:43] The world is connected in all of these interesting and complicated ways in which a war in Mongolia thousands of years ago might affect a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco 100 years from now.
[00:26:01] This is why historians have jobs.
[00:26:04] They connect all of these things and they show how one thing leads to another.
[00:26:08] But that's something we can only do and barely do if the historians are honest, looking backwards.
[00:26:16] And in a small, tiny fraction of a way, we make a big mistake when we stand over God and we say, I know when and why things should happen.
[00:26:28] We don't.
[00:26:31] God knows how our lives should go, though.
[00:26:34] And God is capable and able and to wisely control the beginning and the end, the first causes and the secondary causes, and all the ripple effects that lead out when we remember these things.
[00:26:52] I'm not in charge and I'm not capable of being in charge.
[00:26:56] I deserve much worse than I have and God is being much more gracious than I deserve.
[00:27:02] And just because something bad is happening to me doesn't mean that God, evil, in fact he may be, and even we'll see, promises to be good in the midst of our suffering.
[00:27:17] These are the things that restrain our hearts from accusing the ever good, always perfect God of evil when we struggle.
[00:27:28] And the last of these things is that the good that he gives us is this one. I've been pointing out the way in which he empties us, or the God who empties us is the God who fills us.
[00:27:44] An example of this is a great.
[00:27:49] What do we call it? I want to call it poetry, but it's Paul being really excited.
[00:27:54] In Second Corinthians, he says in Second Corinthians 4, Listen to the way he holds this perspective. He says in Second Corinthians 4, 7, 8, we have this treasure. And he's talking about the proclamation of the Gospel. That's his particular work. We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power, surpassing power, belongs to God and not to us.
[00:28:22] He says we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not driven to despair, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed, or always carrying in the body the death of Jesus.
[00:28:38] So that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus sake.
[00:28:47] So that here's the reason the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our mortal flesh.
[00:28:55] Paul understands that his suffering, his work, the things that he is enduring, and the others around him. Indeed, in a way, all Christians, as we bear forth the witness of Jesus Christ working in our lives, we are aware, we ought to be aware, what the Bible teaches us, that our suffering, that bearing these things and bearing these things and persecution in particular, is ultimately the work of God in us, manifesting forth the life of Jesus, the promises of Jesus, the goodness of Jesus, the wisdom of Jesus.
[00:29:30] And that's exactly what Ruth will experience. If you met Ruth, as her fellow countrymen do on her return, she says, call me bitter.
[00:29:40] She's suffering, she's crying, she's weeping, she's full of heartache.
[00:29:46] But something is coming for her.
[00:29:49] The friendship and loyalty of Ruth and arms eventually full with grandchildren.
[00:29:59] She leaves empty. Or she leaves full, she says she comes back empty. But guess what God's going to do?
[00:30:06] He's going to save her.
[00:30:08] And not just in these kind of material ways, because sometimes that doesn't happen. Elimelech is a good example, but he fills her with himself, with the promises of her goodness, the obvious work of his care for her, and his work in his life.
[00:30:29] Naomi experiences a refilling, as we'll see, a through Ruth, through this eventual Son, but ultimately through whom?
[00:30:39] Through Jesus, through God.
[00:30:43] And he does that by not merely promising to fill the losses that we experience, to kind of replace what we lost, but by giving us something even greater.
[00:30:55] Which is why even Elimelech, for example, could have hope.
[00:31:01] Because it's not just the things in this life that we need.
[00:31:06] Ultimately, what we need is Him.
[00:31:08] We need God.
[00:31:10] And that's one reason God strips us of the things in this life, to teach us what we are, always forgetting that he is our chief end and he is our chief joy. He sometimes strips us of these things so that we might see him and others might see him and in us as the most fundamental thing.
[00:31:33] He wants us to see Him.
[00:31:35] One of our hymns in speaking about the joys of the marriage of Christ in His church, says the bride, eyes not her garment, right? Her beautiful wedding dress and the flowers and her hair, but her bridegroom's face, right? At the wedding day, a good wedding day, right? When you see that couple standing up there, they're looking at each other, they're looking in each other's eyes, and they're so excited to have each other.
[00:32:06] The dress and the flowers and the good food afterward, that's all great, and it's part of it. It's part of the blessings. But those blessings flow from the relationship, from the thing that they ultimately want and the thing that they.
[00:32:22] They are seeking. And when it comes to God, the thing that we really need, food, clothing, meaning, companionship, these are all fundamental parts of being human. But even more fundamental than those is the one through whom all these things come.
[00:32:41] And God teaches Naomi and Ruth and all of us, this is what we need to see. We need to see Him.
[00:32:50] God promises to replace us not just with things in this life, but with Himself. And that's what he does. Not just for this family, if we can zoom out here as we close, but for all the people of Israel.
[00:33:04] If you're still in Ruth, you can flip to the end. If not, that's fine. I'll read it to you.
[00:33:10] But the end of Ruth, the book ends this way, verse 17.
[00:33:21] And the women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, a son has been born to Naomi.
[00:33:28] They named him Obed.
[00:33:30] He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.
[00:33:35] And now if you would please skip with me to Matthew, the Gospel of Matthew, chapter one, And watch how our ever wise and ever good God works his wonders.
[00:34:03] In verse five, we read Matthew 1:5 and salmon, the father of Boaz by Rahab. Interesting note, right?
[00:34:11] Who we'll meet later in the story.
[00:34:15] His mother was Rahab and Boaz, the father of Obed by Ruth. And Obed, the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David, the king.
[00:34:26] All right, so it repeats this genealogy. And do you know the context of this genealogy? It is the genealogy of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the fulfillment, the Messiah to come that was promised to David, that came through this son, that was given to Ruth and to Naomi.
[00:34:46] We don't need to stand over God and judge. He's doing perfectly fine and he's good and he's caring for you and all of us, not only at these huge levels of nations and empires and giant movements, but at the individual level, at the particular level of households, families, the Lord your God, your King, through whom you have access, through Jesus, who came through this genealogy and lived and died for you and adopted you so that you can belong to the family of God.
[00:35:24] This God, this Savior, this Lord.
[00:35:29] He's watching over you.
[00:35:32] He knows you.
[00:35:33] He knows the suffering that's going on in your life. Indeed, he is causing it in some ways, but not to just hurt you, not to make you feel bad, and certainly not to do anything evil.
[00:35:46] He's doing it to sanctify you, to make you more and more holy, to draw you closer and closer to him, to give you more and more of himself, the that you might enjoy him and love him and glorify him and serve him forever.
[00:36:07] This can be hard to understand, it can be hard to go through.
[00:36:13] But we can know that the Lord will bring us through it and will do amazing things in our lives and in the lives of others.
[00:36:22] So beloved in your suffering, in your trials, hold fast to Him.
[00:36:27] Don't let go.
[00:36:28] Watch him and trust him, even when you are unsure.
[00:36:33] Let's pray.
[00:36:35] Our Heavenly Father, we bow our hearts before you as your children, and we ask that you would help us to be calm and to be comforted in the midst of our sorrows.
[00:36:49] Lord, it can be.
[00:36:51] It can feel impossible to understand, much less to even go through the sufferings and the trials that we face, how amazing it is that you transform them for our good.
[00:37:07] Lord, we admit that it can be hard to trust you for these things.
[00:37:13] That in the moments of our weakness and our hunger, in our tears and our bitterness, it can be very, very hard to trust you because of our misconceptions, because of our pride, because of the pain.
[00:37:32] And so, Lord, we simply cry out in Jesus name, have mercy on us.
[00:37:41] Bring us comfort and the kind of comfort that you can bring.
[00:37:47] Be our light in the midst of dark places.
[00:37:51] Guide us in the ways that we do not know.
[00:37:56] Open our minds and hearts to learn how to rest in you, even while we confess and struggle through the hard places.
[00:38:08] Lord, we're thankful that you do not sugarcoat these realities or stuff them or pretend them away.
[00:38:17] We're also thankful, Lord, that you help us to see the bigger picture and to learn how to trust you in the midst of all these things.
[00:38:27] Lord, we thank you for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who is our wisdom, who is the one through whom we have all grace and all mercy, through whom our sins are forgiven. Our adoption is secured and will one day come again to glorify us, that we might live without suffering and without trials, but in the perfection and in the perfection of holiness, forever safe from our enemies, safe from struggle and all evil.
[00:39:04] Lord, we ask that you would help us in these in between times before he comes, to persevere and to go just one more day with hope in you.
[00:39:22] We pray this in Jesus name, Amen.
